


A Knack With the Danger

by unheroics



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Inappropriate Use of Ballet Studio, M/M, Mentor/Protégé
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-11 17:31:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9000142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheroics/pseuds/unheroics
Summary: “This will be his first senior Grand Prix.” Yakov’s mouth is thinned in displeasure. It has been thin from the boy’s successful but hair-rising quad onward. But he had landed it, attitude and controlled fury carefully siphoned into the routine. “I told him to watch you after the junior final. Give him something to aim for.”
“Is that wise? You know what they say, I’m a corrupting influence.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [derogatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/derogatory/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, derogatory! This was supposed to be a Warchild treat but then I saw your YOI prompt, oops.
> 
> Thanks to [redacted] for last minute beta assistance.
> 
> In short: Viktor Nikiforov is not a responsible adult. Assume this takes place in some nebulous ill-defined alternate timeline in which Viktor didn’t leave Russia.

“This will be his first senior Grand Prix.” Yakov’s mouth is thinned in displeasure. It has been thin, his expression increasingly stormy, from the boy’s successful but hair-rising quad onward. But he had landed it, attitude and controlled fury carefully siphoned into the routine. Quads at this age. Viktor wants to unspool the boy into component parts and see where the gears and circuits are hidden. “I told him to watch you after the junior final. Give him something to aim for.”

“Is that wise? You know what they say, I’m a corrupting influence.”

Yakov snorts, an ugly, dismissive bark of laughter. “Oh, I know you are. But for his career, it’ll be worth it.”

On ice, Yuri Plisetsky moves out of an I-spin. The angle of his split is excruciating, but he keeps it without any visible discomfort for long enough that, if Viktor were anyone else, he would feel a sympathetic pain in his groin and thighs. As it is, the aesthetic precision of it brings a smile to his lips.

Yuri is not wearing gloves, and so, when he lowers his skate too indelicately, Viktor can see the exact moment in which the blade cuts through his palm. Blood wells, and Yuri skates away, uncaring.

“You’re not immortal,” says Yakov. The expression freezes on Viktor’s face, and he forces his smile to remain in place. Sharp, but in place. “When you’re ready to step down, he’ll be ready to take over.”

“It sounds like you’ve got my funeral speech all written down and ready.”

“With the Olympic team events, we need a stronger cadre. I want you to coach him for a few weeks, then you can train together.”

“I’m busy. The NHK Trophy is next month.” Curtly. No need for the actual words: _I don’t need a protégé_. What would he do with one? He’s never been good at the housebreaking stage of dog ownership.

“Vitya, this is not a request.”

…

After, cowed into grudging submission in a way he only ever allows Yakov to get away with, Viktor finds Yuri in the changing rooms. Despite the heating, all reflective surfaces are covered with a sheen of condensation, as if a child breathed on them to trace patterns in the fog. But Yuri is the only one there, and Viktor lets his footsteps echo in the emptied room, the sound bouncing off lockers and tiled floors.

“Yuri Nikolaevich?”

“Who’re —” He doesn’t finish. When he turns, it’s to recognise Viktor immediately: his eyes grow wider, but his brow draws down. It’s a pleasant surprise to see temper instead of awe. “Oh. It’s you. What do you want?”

“Has Yakov told you about his plan?”

Yuri shrugs. He coils himself into a loose stretch where he’s straddling the bench, barefoot now with his skates and socks off. “Sure. You’re getting old, and you can’t be the best forever.” He looks up at Viktor from beneath unkempt hair, coldly assessing, and adds: “So I’m gonna be better.”

“Are you.” It’s intriguing, this veneer of arrogance. Not unfounded, no; Yuri is a prodigy, and Yakov must see in him the same potential he had once seen in Viktor. A one-in-a-generation talent. What’s intriguing are the edges of something less certain, something a little desperate, peeking out from underneath the bravado.

Yuri only manages a tense half-minute with Viktor using his height to an advantage. He folds his legs and hauls himself off the bench to try to stare Viktor down. He moves with undisguised but graceful economy of gesture.

He really is quite short. He holds his right hand angled back and to the side, a clumsy attempt at hiding. Of course. The I-spin. “You should let me take a look at that,” says Viktor, changing tracks.

“What?”

“Did you clean it?”

Yuri drops his gaze, confrontational to uncomfortable in the span of a second. Before he can come up with a lie, Viktor takes his hand. Grabs it, really. No need for niceties between colleagues, and Yuri succumbs, though not without a struggle. Tension thrums along his skin like electricity, but he forces it into obedience and allows himself to be handled.

Viktor clucks his tongue, and leads Yuri back to the bench, sits him down, sits beside him. Housebreaking, indeed.

The cut bisects the flesh of Yuri’s palm into uneven halves, along the heart line. The blood hasn’t clotted yet, but the laceration is not so deep that fat or soft tissue shows. Superficial, but doubtlessly painful. Before he can stop himself, Viktor runs the tip of his middle finger along the cut, and Yuri hisses, hand seizing in Viktor’s grip.

Viktor rubs his blood between thumb and middle finger.

“You have hydrogen peroxide, don’t you? Give it here.”

Somewhat to Viktor’s surprise Yuri obeys, twisting to reach into his backpack, awkward with his hand angled back. Viktor doesn’t let him go. Once you’ve caught a wild animal — well. He keeps Yuri’s hand pinned at the juncture of palm and wrist, fingers sinking into the hollows between ridges of bone.

Soon enough the small plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide is on the floor, forgotten, and Viktor wraps Yuri’s hand in elastic bandage, unrolling it carefully to fit around his upper palm where it won’t limit his range of movement.

“You need good gloves. They can be fingerless,” he adds, when Yuri takes in a breath to argue, “but there’s no use bleeding all over the ice. And if you grab the blades wrong, if it’s cold enough, your skin might come clean off.”

Yuri rolls his eyes. Even his amusement is half unwilling. “Yeah, yeah, that only happens if you lick something.”

Without looking up into his eyes, Viktor shows him his own hand. Tiny scars criss-cross the papillary lines all across his palm, fingerprints mauled by years of exposure to low temperatures and ungiving metal. Yuri’s breath comes a little shallow.

“What do you want?” Yuri’s gaze falls somewhere down and to the side, scowl now armed with a layer of unease. “Are we supposed to be friends now?”

Just because Viktor showed him a bare minimum of empathy, and slapped a bandaid over a cut? It’s impossible to say what answer Yuri is waiting for, and which one he’s dreading. Viktor gives him a wide, amicable smile that he knows must ring false. Perhaps a little vacant.

“Friends? Don’t be absurd. We’re teammates.”

He watches Yuri swallow, compulsively, as if it hurts him to do it.

Once you’ve been on stage for as long as Viktor has, everything bleeds in and out of performance. He’s old enough to know that the most skilful artifice is that which seems to come from the heart. What are falsehoods, if not truths performed for an audience?

…

Yuri moves with the grace of a monster, and with an ease that is as poetic as it is ruinous. Mercury in the blood, liquid nitrogen in the limbs, and lethal momentum driving it all into climax.

It isn’t vanity that makes Viktor feel as though he is looking in a mirror, watching Yuri’s ballet routine. Or rather, it isn’t only vanity. The skill, the ruthless command that Yuri wields over himself like a gun cocked and aimed at any potential failing. Those are the same.

Viktor has always been tall, unfortunately so, and has to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting past the natural inclinations of his body: a rigorous, torturous training regimen is the one thing keeping him from physical damage each time he attempts a hyper-extended Biellmann. Yuri has none of his height, has been blessed with a lightness of bone and a frame so slender he should still have a full five years before flexibility becomes an issue, as opposed to an afterthought.

Once he finishes, Viktor joins him at the barre. It feels strange not to be the one examined, but he shakes off the dissonance of his position, and looks at Yuri with a coroner’s eye for detail and anatomy.

“Mm. Second arabesque. When you’re ready.”

It has been almost a month, they are almost at ease around each other. Yuri doesn’t put up a fight before obeying, with only a muttered, “Whatever, I’m ready, shut up.” He moves into the starting position.

“À la hauteur.” Without invitation Viktor takes Yuri’s leg, tracing his palm down his thigh to prompt him to lift. At Viktor’s touch, Yuri’s whole body tenses. He sucks in a breath, and doesn’t let it out. The angle is good. The muscle beneath Viktor’s hand shivers very slightly with the effort that Yuri is extending in order to keep his working leg still, or perhaps to keep all of himself still, in Viktor’s hands. “Push back the sternum.”

The curve of Yuri’s spine is a tragedy waiting to happen: a moth in the second before the pin is driven through its wing.

“Good boy. Now penché.” Viktor slides his palm over Yuri’s leg, pressing inexorably, feeling the heat of his skin through the fabric of his leggings. Air shudders out of the confines of Yuri’s ribs as he makes himself breathe once more, not quite ready yet to relax, but no longer at the precipice of fight or flight. Slowly, he arches his spine and lifts his working leg higher, until his knee becomes level with his head.

Viktor can almost taste the mercury, the liquid nitrogen; Yuri’s joints are angled to the point of pain and then he crosses it, and looks into the mirror to meet Viktor’s gaze there. Nothing shows in his expression, nothing but corpselike, paper-thin calm. Viktor’s fingers brush down the hard length of tibia, halfway to the ankle.

He wonders, briefly, what would happen if he kept pushing.

“Keep your working hip open.” But he needn’t say it, Yuri is already shifting to fix the slight imprecision.

He is one of the very few danseurs Viktor has met that has absolute rotation through his support leg. It’s art in motion, stilled to be appreciated, and touching it — touching Yuri, poised on the brink of catharsis — well. Viktor has always been a slave to aesthetics.

He keeps one hand folded over Yuri’s raised ankle. A suggestion of firmer touch, or perhaps a promise of it. A threat. He lifts his other hand to stabilise Yuri’s torso, placing his palm at the base of Yuri’s ribcage, below the solar plexus. At the place where bone wanes, cut off sharply by the flat, tensed plane of Yuri’s stomach. A low noise makes it past Yuri’s clenched teeth, but he keeps his eyes open, keeps watching Viktor watching him. All in the mirror. All in the performance.

Holding him at these two points is like holding a live wire. Yuri doesn’t need Viktor’s hands, needs them even less to be careful. He is current ready to snap into lethal action at the merest provocation, but, anathema to his visible need to move, Yuri wills his body to be absolutely still. Keeps it there.

“Arm up,” says Viktor, and almost flinches away at the sound of his own voice. Not like his voice at all.

Yuri lifts his right arm. Viktor feels the movement in the touch he has on Yuri, the stretch of muscle that starts in his abdomen. Belatedly, he realises — and then only because he sees it reflected in the mirror — he realises that he’s idly stroking the hollow of Yuri’s Achilles tendon. He stops.

Then, deliberately, he starts again.

“You’re not —” Yuri breathes. “My other coaches did it differently, y’know.”

“Because they’re cold,” says Viktor, laughing, and what he means is: _They wouldn’t touch you like this; and you need to be touched like this_.

Yuri’s reflection in the mirror doesn’t seem to know where to focus its gaze. His adam’s apple works as he swallows around whatever it is he won’t say in response, until his better judgement takes a step back and he meets Viktor’s eye and says, “You’re cold in a different way. You’re worse.”

“Oh, am I?” Viktor takes a step back, leaving Yuri inert and weightless, and sees Yuri forcing himself to hold the pose. Forcing himself not to follow, unmoored in the absence of contact. And Viktor sees, then, that he will never be perfect unless he’s balancing on the knife’s edge of hysteria. He will never win, unless it breaks him.

The noise Yuri lets out when Viktor forces him out of the position is the first true noise of pain he’s allowed himself in the whole time they have been at the studio. He lands back on his heels with a loud, hollow thump of bone on floorboards: first support foot, then the other as he regains his balance. Viktor spins him until they are face to face, fingers digging into the muscle of Yuri’s biceps. Another noise, similarly pained, as Yuri’s lower back meets the barre, spine colliding with polished wood.

It all happens quickly, but every mirror in the studio reflects it: the moment in which Viktor places one palm flatly over Yuri’s solar plexus — higher, so that one fingertip brushes Yuri’s collar bone — and pushes. Until Yuri’s shoulder blades hit the glass, and he is pinned, stubbornly bearing Viktor’s touch, despite the cumbersome arch of his spine.

“Then what would you like me to do?” Viktor leans forward, the better to see every minute shift in Yuri’s expression, the cornered fury.

Yuri glares at him, the set of his mouth tight and angry, all the graceful poise he’d held in his arabesque now gone. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever I say, you’ll just do the opposite.”

“I wouldn’t want to be boring,” says Viktor, twisting his mouth into a pout.

“You’re not, you —” Yuri doesn’t quite growl. He doesn’t quite move, either; doesn’t shake off Viktor’s touch, even though Viktor can plainly see how much he wants to be rid of it. How much it unsettles him, to be held down. Instead Yuri lifts his chin, a gesture only defiant until Viktor catches sight of the two of them out of the corner of his eye in the mirror: and there, he sees surrender. He sees how the slight shift in posture leaves Yuri’s throat bared.

“Touch me,” says Yuri, still furious, still glaring bloody murder, as though it’s a dare.

Viktor lets the fingers of his hand curl over the shape of Yuri’s neck, thumb at one pulse point, index and middle fingers at the other. They stand so close that he can feel the heat coming off Yuri’s body, despite his practice clothes, and Yuri’s dance belt hides nothing. He’s hard. Viktor bites the inside of his cheek. “Is that what you want? Or do you want me to do the opposite?”

No need for mirrors to see the indecision. Yuri’s hands are clenched tightly at his sides, but then he allows one to reach out, and the grip of his fingers closing around Viktor’s forearm is punishing.

Viktor knows, with an almost painful but gratifying clarity, that there is no wrong move here. For him, at least. He might have backed himself into a corner: feet planted wide, centre of gravity angled toward Yuri to keep him pinned to the barre and to the mirror, his hand on Yuri and Yuri’s hand on him. But whatever he does, whichever direction he chooses, he wins. Yuri expects nothing of him, and everything. He wants nothing. He wants everything.

It has been a long time since Viktor managed to surprise himself.

Their reflections in the mirrors, multiplied a thousandfold into vanishing infinity, show every point and angle of the collision when Yuri loses all remaining shreds of patience and drags Viktor down toward him. It’s almost easier to watch it there, as a reflection, removed from feeling and consequence. In the mirror, no sound accompanies Viktor lowering himself to his knees, and no sound carries as Yuri breathes out sharply as if the air has been knocked out of his lungs. In the mirror, no sound echoes across the studio when Yuri drops down into an awkward squat before he topples the both of them over with a curse that is stifled against the skin of Viktor’s throat.

Viktor forcibly pulls himself into the present, away from the front-row seats and onto the stage.

“You win,” Yuri says, hands full of Viktor’s practice t-shirt as he tries to get at bare skin. Every line of his body is pulled taut, and he’s as eager as he is demanding. “You _win_ , are you happy now?”

Viktor tries to cover Yuri’s mouth, to keep the noise in — it really would be unfortunate if someone were to hear, and walk in, and see them like this — but Yuri only takes two of his fingers into his mouth and bites down. He grins sharply when Viktor lets out a faint noise. It’s very distracting. Yuri’s teeth digging into thin skin stretched over Viktor’s phalanges, his expression.

Is he happy now? Quite happy, Viktor thinks, and realises he’d said it aloud when Yuri spits out his fingers and folds down to kiss him. Yuri’s hair falls into Viktor’s eyes, soft and ticklish.

It’s a little undignified, the whole thing, and the sounds are a little obscene. They echo in the empty studio.

Viktor unseams the rigid discipline that holds Yuri’s body together, and in return lets Yuri peel off one or two of his own masks. Every mirror reflects them.

…

There is no need to talk about it. They’re teammates, after all. Yuri remains belligerent and arrogant, and Viktor doesn’t need to turn the degree of his flirting either down or up. If Yakov knows, he chooses to look the other way.

The studio is busy, at this hour. Lilia is clapping out a quick tempo to direct her pupils’ shift from one position to the next. Yuri picked a more secluded spot, not as well-lit as the centre of the room, but he doesn’t need light. He moves through adagio without a hitch, until he sees that Viktor, beside him, has stopped.

“Are you just going to stand here and stare?” He crosses his arms over his chest, scowling down the length of his nose. “Move. I’m timing myself to your creaky arthritis.”

Viktor pushes himself away from the barre, turns on his heel with an indistinct gesture. “Time yourself to the others.”

Yuri stills him with a hand at his elbow, gripping tightly. Then he lets go, just as quickly, horrified at this excess of emotion.

It would take a stronger man than Viktor to pretend at propriety. He lifts one hand until his thumb and index finger meet at the edge of Yuri’s chin, and he tilts Yuri’s head up, until he can’t hide behind the fall of his hair.

“You won’t impress me if I’m here for every minute of your training,” says Viktor, smiling, less at the situation and more at the feeling of holding all of Yuri’s potential in the palm of his hand, his to nurture or ruin. “And I’d like you to keep impressing me.”

“Right. Wouldn’t want to be boring,” Yuri says, parroting Viktor’s words back at him.

“That’s the game.” Viktor moves back. This time, Yuri doesn’t stop him. “I’ll see you on ice.”


End file.
